Has anybody been able to do dual-tuners on DirecTV without paying for two receivers? And what is the price tag on the hardware?
My main issue with MythTV is that it is somewhat expensive to set up (you probably couldn't get away with an old Pentium 120 in the basement - you probably need something with a little more power), and it doesn't have dual tuners like a DirecTivo.
If I had dual tuners I'd drop Tivo in a heartbeat. The other week I had to reimage due to terminal slowness following an upgrade (it was almost terminally slow before the upgrade). It also sounded like the hard drive was on the edge of death. Now, I understand that hardware gets old, and I'm fine with that. The problem with Tivo is that there is no support for fix-it-yourself outside of a hacker community. With Myth you can actually talk about how it works with the people who made it, and as a result if something goes wrong you can actually fix it yourself...
Actually - yes if they want to have it resolve via OpenNIC.
They were using.biz before ICANN was, so they decided to keep their own registrar. walmart.biz resolves different depending on whether you use the ICANN or OpenNIC TLDs.
Now, how many people actually use OpenNIC I couldn't say...
Gentoo usually uses deltas for kernel downloads - at least for security patches. Anybody who is updating that still has the old tgz file sitting around only needs to download the 1K patch file.
You described the current setup - not my proposed one.
The main difference would be that ICANN would maintain the master server - but that server would not be reachable by anything other than the replica DNS servers and the registrars. You could run that on a Athlon over a T1 line.
The current setup puts the master server in the hands of Verisign, as well as all the replica DNS servers. I would propose breaking that part up. They could be a registrar, and they could run some replica servers, but they wouldn't run the master server and they couldn't run all the replica servers.
If ICANN wants to outsource domain dispute handling that is fine too, as long as they have the power to step in when they need to.
So, if a company like Verisign wants to start implementing sitefinder or otherwise breaking RFCs, ICANN simply changes the root servers to remove their replica servers from the list, and the problem is instantly solved. The DNS load falls to the other contracted companies, who might be paid based on relative number of queries served or something like that (to be tested by a 3rd party logging in via various normal ISPs and running DNS queries at various times during the month and counting up who ended up handling each).
The problem with Verisign is that ICANN can't pull the plug without shutting off the Internet as we know it. That isn't a good bargaining position. My proposal would let ICANN outsource all the heavy lifting while keeping the most critical parts of the opreation in their own control.
Outsourcing is fine and all, but why would you outsource all control over something when you get almost the same benefit from outsourcing all the hard parts and keeping the easy part which is also the most critical one?
Actually, some of the other posts in this thread have hit on an idea - a 1-off registry.
You register a.com DNS address with one or more registars. An ICANN-run server combines all this into a single database (they own the master registry). Then, a subcontracted set of servers replicate that master database, and those are the ones that are pointed to as the DNS servers for.com.
ICANN owns the key piece of infrastructure - the master domain list. However, the hardware for this needs only be moderate and is not critical to internet operation. They can now subcontract the running of the DNS servers to as many other companies as they want, and they are only providing DNS resolution services. ICANN doesn't deal with end-users on either end - both registration and resolution are outsourced. They can just charge the registrars a flat per-entry fee which gets passed back to domain owners.
Slave DNS servers fortunately are well-handled by DNS already...
I think his point is that this isn't just an isolated incident. And MySQL is billed as a production-ready RDBMS which probably shouldn't be considered such (unless you don't need data integrity - maybe a database used to do analyses on static data or something like that where you only run read-only queries).
Originally the MySQL devs advertised such things as transaction support as being overrated features. That is basically opening yourself up to this kind of abuse.
Imagine if Linus said that buffer overflows are overrated, and that no care would be taken to prevent them in the kernel. Users shouldn't be feeding bad data to the OS anyway. Fast forward a few years and Linus has time to implement buffer overflow protection, but surprise his patchwork is buggy and the kernel is full of holes. While it would be nice to file bug-reports when the holes are found, Linus would have opened himself up to criticism for not taking security to heart in his main design.
MySQL is getting there, but it isn't there yet. Many of the I-told-you-so'ers are probably voicing these concerns since the DB would be much more reliable if it things like ACID-compliance weren't considered nice-to-haves on design day 1.
FYI - I use mysql. (I'd probably prefer postgres, but many FOSS packages do not support it, and so I'm stuck with mysql until they do, by which time mysql might be good enough to stick around with...)
Most people who don't care about ACID probably haven't worked with enterprise-class databases. When you have millions of records in a table you can't afford to discover a bug that might have been changing some indeterminate number of records ever so slightly over the previous 18 months. Application bugs are bad enough - but if the RDBMS hiccups you're usually in really big trouble. Even trying to analyze these problems once you know what happened is horrible - you can't just browse through the data - you need to almost handle it statistically. Usually you don't fix the problem - you mitigate it. Unless you want to rollback a year's worth of work your backups are often useless.
Sometimes the DB just has to work. 5 9's aren't good enough when your dataset has 8 zeros...
Fair enough, but if you do want the government to endorse a particular product, wouldn't it be better to endorse an open-source one if the choice is available?
only GPL-like license that actually closes the web services loophole (the Affero GPL), which is mentioned as a template for the GPLv3, ISNT GPL compatible!
That really isn't a problem. If software is licensed under GPLv2 you just can't use the new license. If it is licensed as GPLv2 or later, then you can even though it is not compatible. Future versions of the software will be a mix of parts which are GPLv2 or later and GPLv3 or later.
The web services loophole won't be closed until all the GPLv2 code is replaced - otherwise you can just use GPLv2 to make your web service application...
Of course, these aren't really big wars in the WWII style of things.
Historically, war happened when one ethnic/language group wanted things (usually land) that belonged to another ethnic/language group. Who is an ally - somebody who speaks your language. Who is an enemy/subject - somebody who doesn't.
When the English took over a French town in the middle ages you wouldn't have an underground resistance - the peasants had the same lot as always they just paid their taxes to a different unelected king. If there were a result the troops would have probably just killed anybody with a French accent.
The problems in Iraq and Israel are related to modern warfare - when one country wants to exert influence over another without totally dominating them.
In WWII a Japanese person walking towards a US checkpoint was probably considered a target. Fast-forward 50 years and in Iraq friend and foe all look the same.
I'm not sure whether numbers or technology would win a true war. That is a war in which both sides stand to completely lose - when all the stops are pulled out. The allies bombed Dresden because it was a real war. That would never happen in Iraq (I'm not talking about isolated bombing mistakes that collectively kill a few thousand people - I'm talking about an intentional planned attack whose goal is to kill off most of the residents of an entire city).
I'm not sure whether a country that ran out of women to marry would be a serious problem - maybe it would. If they don't mind interractial marriage I wouldn't want to be a male in a neighboring province, though.
My main point is that I wouldn't draw conclusions based on modern limited wars and apply them to theoretical future unlimited wars. War knows no limits - at least on the part of a party that thinks it might lose. The US isn't worried about losing in Iraq, so it can afford to play "nice" (if you can use such a word to describe war). Sadaam was willing to pull out all the stops, however (such as human shields). If this were Germany vs Britain in WWII, however, and there were Germans standing on bridges, the bomber pilots would probably have welcomed the extra carnage.
If you want to study unlimited warfare you'd do better to ignore Iraq and look at Africa instead. Technology there is a bit limited, but there are certainly no limits on how it is employed...
as long the government will supply you with a printed copy
I was interested in looking up some publicly available information held by my state government. They even had a website that told me what microfilm it was stored on. However, to see the microfilm I had to either travel 100 miles to the capital or pay an exorbitant copying fee.
Should California residenets be required to travel to a Washington DC reading room to read some important regulatory document, or use MS Word?
Even if technically there is a loophole it is basically a government endorsement of a product.
Offering a replacement for phone service and not giving 911 services is utterly ludicrous.
Why is that? Perhaps 911 just isn't worth the cost to support it. We have free competition between a service which does support it, and one which supports it with a few limitations. Shouldn't consumers be free to choose?
If you're afraid of not being able to pick up a phone and dial 911 then refuse to go inside anybody's home unless they patronize your favorite telco.
There seems to be a presumption that any cost is reasonable if it saves a life. That is hardly true - every dime you spend on 911 service is one less dime you have to feed some poor starving soul in Africa or wherever.
Resources are limited - people need to decide where the best place to use those resources are. If 911 is important to people, then they will not buy VOIP. If 911 isn't important to somebody, who are you to tell them that they are wrong? If you're afriad that their home is a death trap then don't visit them, and forbid your kids from playing in their yard.
All suing Vonage will accomplish is raising their rates. Eventually we'll be suing for not providing service to people who can't pay their bills and next thing you know they'll be just as expensive as the regular phone company. If people were satisfied with that, they wouldn't be using Vonage in the first place.
The problem is that the average consumer really doesn't care that much about 911. They might say they do, but not enough to be willing to pay for it. The only reason many do pay for it is that various authorities have decided that they don't know what is good for them and consequently deny them the choice of opting out of 911 fees. VOIP has given people a choice, and the people have responded.
Seriously, I really hope nothing bad ever happens to you, cuz if you live around like minded people, you're gonna get the 'well you should have known better' than a helping hand.
Uh, what helping hand did you offer to that little girl? It sounds like the only thing you're offering is that some company should be nailed to a cross because they didn't offer what you judge to be enough of a helping hand.
It is horrible that the girl felt helpless, but she'd have felt just as helpless if her parents had been shot when there was no phone in sight. Should somebody be sued in that case for not putting phones in grid-fashion at 30-meter intervals across the entire countryside?
I'm glad that nobody died, and horrified that this even happened, but the solution isn't to sue VOIP providers. Why don't you ask your local community what they're doing to ensure that VOIP providers that service your area are able to reach your emergency services, and that they are kept abreast of the lastest changes in call center numbers and hours? Emergency services are a function of local government, not international corporations.
I guess that is one of my pet peeves. Somebody comes along and says that for only $x we can save an extra 50 lives per year. Typically x is in the 8+ figure range in these scenarios. Anybody who tries to make a rational counterarument is yelled down as being heartless and putting a price on lives, and pictures of helpless little girls are generally paraded around the town.
Following this analogy we could simply hire an armed security guard for every home in the USA. That shouldn't cost more than a few trillion dollars - but we can't put a price on life, can we?
Joe User has little idea, if any, about Macrovision, CSS, and DVD Regions. The majority of players sold fully implement these restrictions.
You obviously don't live in Europe.
At work I discovered that many of my European colleagues who by no means follow these kinds of issues are very aware of what region coding is, and how to go about obtaining a DVD player which can be hacked to circumvent it.
Americans don't understand it since you can get any movie you want in the US - for the most part. In Europe you routinely wait months for DVD releases after they're available in the US, and so everybody just imports their movies.
Trust me - if the average CD didn't work in a car CD player the average American would have a way of getting around it in no time at all. Either somebody would sell them a solution, or they'd take the time to learn how to improvise the solution.
DRM only survives since it is not routinely encountered. If a cable network started blocking VCR recording of TV shows via some broadcast-flag-style system, the system would be cracked in no time at all. There is only so much control you can exert over 99% of the population before they do a head count and figure out which side has more bodies.
I'm not sure that's a good example considering the time wasted both generating and reading the useless email that gets CC'd to half the company.
Well, there's no helping having idiots on board. Still, many of these annoucements help to bring the rank and file up to date on strategic corporate decisions, which makes it much easier for a big company to change course.
It used to be that the President would have a meeting with the VPs, and then in a month the VPs would travel out and have meetings with their reports, and so on. The guys doing the work aren't impacted by the change for a year. Now you can send out policy changes and implement them in a week. Now, that is tremendous power to both create and destroy, and if abused it results in nobody getting anything done since they're bombarded with policies three times a week. However, it represents a tremendous power that can be used for the good of a company, if used wisely.
Since our management can't get it right in any case, there doesn't necessarily seem to be an advantage to one method.
Couldn't agree more there. Money needs to be allocated at a high level to set the strategic direction of the company - in big buckets. The masters of the buckets have to spend it wisely, and they have to be trusted to spend it wisely.
Individual low-level managers have to have discretion when spending their funds. The CEO can't steer the company by blanket policy changes except in response to a serious need.
I still think that things have improved when you look at the dimensions of quality, timeliness, and cost. Maybe in some areas the cost hasn't gone down, but things are getting done better or faster. Computers can have a big impact on quality, since they allow better standardization of processes.
there doesn't seem to be such a huge demand for the tapes
I can't imagine why there wouldn't be a high demand for 120 hours of science lectures on tape for the low-low price of $800.
I could probably attend a live course and get credit for about that much money.
I'm sure if they put it on CD and charged $1 per disc they'd be more likely to get somewhere. At the proposed price just about anybody inclined to listen to it would go to the trouble to download and burn the whole thing...
Seriously though, I question studies which show no benefits from computers.
Usually they simply state that companies aren't making any more money now than they used to be, and so productivity hasn't imporved. The two aren't directly connected, however.
What happened is that everybody automated, and so everybody's costs dropped, and so everybody lowered prices to compete. Everybody makes the same money, but a tax accountant today costs the same or less in 2005 dollars as they cost back in the 70's using 1970 dollars. That is a big drop in price.
How can anybody seriously say that IT has had no benefit on productivity? Would we really be more effective if we were sending mail instead of e-mail? Or leaving 15 minute voicemails? Would the department budget really be better managed using paper and pencil rather than spreadsheet?
I can make statistics say anything I want, but only if you're stupid enough not to ask how I arrived at them...
Oh, it is DEFINITELY faster. The extra regs are the biggest factor, but there are other improvements as well. There is also less CFLAG variation since right now there is really only one amd64 feature-set.
However, it is a little less bug-free.
Seriously, though, amd64 on gentoo does work fairly well - I use it for everything, and I have a 32-bit chroot for the few packages that don't work well. The only thing that gets messy is when you have a 32/64-bit browser and want to use plugins that are 64/32-bit. You can run 32-bit apps linked to 32-bit so's, and 64-bit linked to 64-bit, but you can't link the two together.
I'm fine with having trusted computing in PCs everywhere. I want to be able to trust my PC.
My only requirement is that I be given a copy of all keys stored within the computer, and a copy of any related keys associated with them using public-key-crypto.
If the motive of the people putting keys in my computer was purely to keep me safe, then they would have no qualms with giving me this information. If on the other hand they want to restrict how I use my computer, then they have every motive to not give it to me.
The problem with trusted computing is that major industries want to be able to trust computers that belong to others, not that people want to trust the computers that they actually own.
As long as I'm in charge I'm happy to have additional security features embedded in my PC...
Sounds to me like the laptop benchmarks should be to pull the AC power line and measure:
1. Total digits of pi calculated. 2. Total seconds of mp3 encoded. 3. Total minutes of DVD played. 4. Total number of frames rendered in some 3D project. etc.
Then we don't fight over how many watts this model uses and the various tradeoffs involved. If it uses less power it will have more time to work. If it goes faster it will get more done in less time. Give the consumer all the numbers and he can figure out whether he'd rather have a laptop that is good and encoding mp3s or one which will last a long time spinning DVDs.
Actually, the x86 should handle virtualization just fine, as long as the operating systems don't need to run in ring 0.
The main problem with the x86 is that a process is either privileged or not - there is only really a two-level heirarchy.
I guess the best system would be one with arbitrary levels of privs.
You could just add one more level and that would make the VMMs secure. However, it would make the platform unsuitable for VMMMs by the same argument, and consequently we'll need a platform which is better still, just in case you want to run windows and linux under linux, and then run linux under that windows and windows under that linux. However, that still won't help if you want to run windows under linux under windows under linux...:)
Well, my Tivo is doing that all the time now. It studders fairly often, and then will reboot - causing whatever is being recorded to lose about 5 minutes.
Granted, I just installed a hard drive upgrade a week ago, which I think put it over the top. Before that it was just incredibly slow (it could take 30 seconds to display the list of recorded shows, and sometimes when fastforwarding you'd overshoot by 20 minutes before the system would respond to the remote). Forget editing season passes - you have to literally wait 15 minutes - that was before I upgraded it.
I'm probably going to reimage back to a single drive (the newer one), and see if that helps.
Don't get me wrong, Tivo is great. However, the series 1 units in particular have their limitations. What is annoying is that there is no documentation as to what those limits are. It would be one thing if Tivo at least advertised that it was good for up to x season passes, etc.
Who knows, maybe after a reimage everything will work fine.
Now, if I can only get rid of that horrible noise (my guess is that the fan is going too). Well, who expects consumer products to last four years these days anyway...:)
If you customized each customer's code, they probably will keep it private and accomplish your goals, which are all legal under the GPL.
Note that if you for some reason start getting lazy in supporting them your customers can just take your code and give it to somebody else to maintain. They could also ship it to Elbonia for future maintenance.
Likewise, if you started raising prices and your customers became dissatisfied they could band together and create a replacement for you which would maintain all of their code while maintaining confidentiality. They could even hire a programmer to run diffs to tell apart the areas of code that you provided to all customers vs a single one. Common code could then be donated back to the parent project that you borrowed from for maintenance.
The GPL allows for many business models, like the one that you propose. What it does though is empower the customer - if the vendor gets out of control the customer can go to somebody else, or bring maintenance in-house.
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Has anybody been able to do dual-tuners on DirecTV without paying for two receivers? And what is the price tag on the hardware?
My main issue with MythTV is that it is somewhat expensive to set up (you probably couldn't get away with an old Pentium 120 in the basement - you probably need something with a little more power), and it doesn't have dual tuners like a DirecTivo.
If I had dual tuners I'd drop Tivo in a heartbeat. The other week I had to reimage due to terminal slowness following an upgrade (it was almost terminally slow before the upgrade). It also sounded like the hard drive was on the edge of death. Now, I understand that hardware gets old, and I'm fine with that. The problem with Tivo is that there is no support for fix-it-yourself outside of a hacker community. With Myth you can actually talk about how it works with the people who made it, and as a result if something goes wrong you can actually fix it yourself...
Actually - yes if they want to have it resolve via OpenNIC.
.biz before ICANN was, so they decided to keep their own registrar. walmart.biz resolves different depending on whether you use the ICANN or OpenNIC TLDs.
They were using
Now, how many people actually use OpenNIC I couldn't say...
Gentoo usually uses deltas for kernel downloads - at least for security patches. Anybody who is updating that still has the old tgz file sitting around only needs to download the 1K patch file.
You described the current setup - not my proposed one.
The main difference would be that ICANN would maintain the master server - but that server would not be reachable by anything other than the replica DNS servers and the registrars. You could run that on a Athlon over a T1 line.
The current setup puts the master server in the hands of Verisign, as well as all the replica DNS servers. I would propose breaking that part up. They could be a registrar, and they could run some replica servers, but they wouldn't run the master server and they couldn't run all the replica servers.
If ICANN wants to outsource domain dispute handling that is fine too, as long as they have the power to step in when they need to.
So, if a company like Verisign wants to start implementing sitefinder or otherwise breaking RFCs, ICANN simply changes the root servers to remove their replica servers from the list, and the problem is instantly solved. The DNS load falls to the other contracted companies, who might be paid based on relative number of queries served or something like that (to be tested by a 3rd party logging in via various normal ISPs and running DNS queries at various times during the month and counting up who ended up handling each).
The problem with Verisign is that ICANN can't pull the plug without shutting off the Internet as we know it. That isn't a good bargaining position. My proposal would let ICANN outsource all the heavy lifting while keeping the most critical parts of the opreation in their own control.
Outsourcing is fine and all, but why would you outsource all control over something when you get almost the same benefit from outsourcing all the hard parts and keeping the easy part which is also the most critical one?
Actually, some of the other posts in this thread have hit on an idea - a 1-off registry.
.com DNS address with one or more registars. An ICANN-run server combines all this into a single database (they own the master registry). Then, a subcontracted set of servers replicate that master database, and those are the ones that are pointed to as the DNS servers for .com.
You register a
ICANN owns the key piece of infrastructure - the master domain list. However, the hardware for this needs only be moderate and is not critical to internet operation. They can now subcontract the running of the DNS servers to as many other companies as they want, and they are only providing DNS resolution services. ICANN doesn't deal with end-users on either end - both registration and resolution are outsourced. They can just charge the registrars a flat per-entry fee which gets passed back to domain owners.
Slave DNS servers fortunately are well-handled by DNS already...
I think his point is that this isn't just an isolated incident. And MySQL is billed as a production-ready RDBMS which probably shouldn't be considered such (unless you don't need data integrity - maybe a database used to do analyses on static data or something like that where you only run read-only queries).
Originally the MySQL devs advertised such things as transaction support as being overrated features. That is basically opening yourself up to this kind of abuse.
Imagine if Linus said that buffer overflows are overrated, and that no care would be taken to prevent them in the kernel. Users shouldn't be feeding bad data to the OS anyway. Fast forward a few years and Linus has time to implement buffer overflow protection, but surprise his patchwork is buggy and the kernel is full of holes. While it would be nice to file bug-reports when the holes are found, Linus would have opened himself up to criticism for not taking security to heart in his main design.
MySQL is getting there, but it isn't there yet. Many of the I-told-you-so'ers are probably voicing these concerns since the DB would be much more reliable if it things like ACID-compliance weren't considered nice-to-haves on design day 1.
FYI - I use mysql. (I'd probably prefer postgres, but many FOSS packages do not support it, and so I'm stuck with mysql until they do, by which time mysql might be good enough to stick around with...)
Most people who don't care about ACID probably haven't worked with enterprise-class databases. When you have millions of records in a table you can't afford to discover a bug that might have been changing some indeterminate number of records ever so slightly over the previous 18 months. Application bugs are bad enough - but if the RDBMS hiccups you're usually in really big trouble. Even trying to analyze these problems once you know what happened is horrible - you can't just browse through the data - you need to almost handle it statistically. Usually you don't fix the problem - you mitigate it. Unless you want to rollback a year's worth of work your backups are often useless.
Sometimes the DB just has to work. 5 9's aren't good enough when your dataset has 8 zeros...
Fair enough, but if you do want the government to endorse a particular product, wouldn't it be better to endorse an open-source one if the choice is available?
only GPL-like license that actually closes the web services loophole (the Affero GPL), which is mentioned as a template for the GPLv3, ISNT GPL compatible!
That really isn't a problem. If software is licensed under GPLv2 you just can't use the new license. If it is licensed as GPLv2 or later, then you can even though it is not compatible. Future versions of the software will be a mix of parts which are GPLv2 or later and GPLv3 or later.
The web services loophole won't be closed until all the GPLv2 code is replaced - otherwise you can just use GPLv2 to make your web service application...
Of course, these aren't really big wars in the WWII style of things.
Historically, war happened when one ethnic/language group wanted things (usually land) that belonged to another ethnic/language group. Who is an ally - somebody who speaks your language. Who is an enemy/subject - somebody who doesn't.
When the English took over a French town in the middle ages you wouldn't have an underground resistance - the peasants had the same lot as always they just paid their taxes to a different unelected king. If there were a result the troops would have probably just killed anybody with a French accent.
The problems in Iraq and Israel are related to modern warfare - when one country wants to exert influence over another without totally dominating them.
In WWII a Japanese person walking towards a US checkpoint was probably considered a target. Fast-forward 50 years and in Iraq friend and foe all look the same.
I'm not sure whether numbers or technology would win a true war. That is a war in which both sides stand to completely lose - when all the stops are pulled out. The allies bombed Dresden because it was a real war. That would never happen in Iraq (I'm not talking about isolated bombing mistakes that collectively kill a few thousand people - I'm talking about an intentional planned attack whose goal is to kill off most of the residents of an entire city).
I'm not sure whether a country that ran out of women to marry would be a serious problem - maybe it would. If they don't mind interractial marriage I wouldn't want to be a male in a neighboring province, though.
My main point is that I wouldn't draw conclusions based on modern limited wars and apply them to theoretical future unlimited wars. War knows no limits - at least on the part of a party that thinks it might lose. The US isn't worried about losing in Iraq, so it can afford to play "nice" (if you can use such a word to describe war). Sadaam was willing to pull out all the stops, however (such as human shields). If this were Germany vs Britain in WWII, however, and there were Germans standing on bridges, the bomber pilots would probably have welcomed the extra carnage.
If you want to study unlimited warfare you'd do better to ignore Iraq and look at Africa instead. Technology there is a bit limited, but there are certainly no limits on how it is employed...
as long the government will supply you with a printed copy
I was interested in looking up some publicly available information held by my state government. They even had a website that told me what microfilm it was stored on. However, to see the microfilm I had to either travel 100 miles to the capital or pay an exorbitant copying fee.
Should California residenets be required to travel to a Washington DC reading room to read some important regulatory document, or use MS Word?
Even if technically there is a loophole it is basically a government endorsement of a product.
Offering a replacement for phone service and not giving 911 services is utterly ludicrous.
Why is that? Perhaps 911 just isn't worth the cost to support it. We have free competition between a service which does support it, and one which supports it with a few limitations. Shouldn't consumers be free to choose?
If you're afraid of not being able to pick up a phone and dial 911 then refuse to go inside anybody's home unless they patronize your favorite telco.
There seems to be a presumption that any cost is reasonable if it saves a life. That is hardly true - every dime you spend on 911 service is one less dime you have to feed some poor starving soul in Africa or wherever.
Resources are limited - people need to decide where the best place to use those resources are. If 911 is important to people, then they will not buy VOIP. If 911 isn't important to somebody, who are you to tell them that they are wrong? If you're afriad that their home is a death trap then don't visit them, and forbid your kids from playing in their yard.
All suing Vonage will accomplish is raising their rates. Eventually we'll be suing for not providing service to people who can't pay their bills and next thing you know they'll be just as expensive as the regular phone company. If people were satisfied with that, they wouldn't be using Vonage in the first place.
The problem is that the average consumer really doesn't care that much about 911. They might say they do, but not enough to be willing to pay for it. The only reason many do pay for it is that various authorities have decided that they don't know what is good for them and consequently deny them the choice of opting out of 911 fees. VOIP has given people a choice, and the people have responded.
Seriously, I really hope nothing bad ever happens to you, cuz if you live around like minded people, you're gonna get the 'well you should have known better' than a helping hand.
Uh, what helping hand did you offer to that little girl? It sounds like the only thing you're offering is that some company should be nailed to a cross because they didn't offer what you judge to be enough of a helping hand.
It is horrible that the girl felt helpless, but she'd have felt just as helpless if her parents had been shot when there was no phone in sight. Should somebody be sued in that case for not putting phones in grid-fashion at 30-meter intervals across the entire countryside?
I'm glad that nobody died, and horrified that this even happened, but the solution isn't to sue VOIP providers. Why don't you ask your local community what they're doing to ensure that VOIP providers that service your area are able to reach your emergency services, and that they are kept abreast of the lastest changes in call center numbers and hours? Emergency services are a function of local government, not international corporations.
I guess that is one of my pet peeves. Somebody comes along and says that for only $x we can save an extra 50 lives per year. Typically x is in the 8+ figure range in these scenarios. Anybody who tries to make a rational counterarument is yelled down as being heartless and putting a price on lives, and pictures of helpless little girls are generally paraded around the town.
Following this analogy we could simply hire an armed security guard for every home in the USA. That shouldn't cost more than a few trillion dollars - but we can't put a price on life, can we?
Joe User has little idea, if any, about Macrovision, CSS, and DVD Regions. The majority of players sold fully implement these restrictions.
You obviously don't live in Europe.
At work I discovered that many of my European colleagues who by no means follow these kinds of issues are very aware of what region coding is, and how to go about obtaining a DVD player which can be hacked to circumvent it.
Americans don't understand it since you can get any movie you want in the US - for the most part. In Europe you routinely wait months for DVD releases after they're available in the US, and so everybody just imports their movies.
Trust me - if the average CD didn't work in a car CD player the average American would have a way of getting around it in no time at all. Either somebody would sell them a solution, or they'd take the time to learn how to improvise the solution.
DRM only survives since it is not routinely encountered. If a cable network started blocking VCR recording of TV shows via some broadcast-flag-style system, the system would be cracked in no time at all. There is only so much control you can exert over 99% of the population before they do a head count and figure out which side has more bodies.
I'm not sure that's a good example considering the time wasted both generating and reading the useless email that gets CC'd to half the company.
Well, there's no helping having idiots on board. Still, many of these annoucements help to bring the rank and file up to date on strategic corporate decisions, which makes it much easier for a big company to change course.
It used to be that the President would have a meeting with the VPs, and then in a month the VPs would travel out and have meetings with their reports, and so on. The guys doing the work aren't impacted by the change for a year. Now you can send out policy changes and implement them in a week. Now, that is tremendous power to both create and destroy, and if abused it results in nobody getting anything done since they're bombarded with policies three times a week. However, it represents a tremendous power that can be used for the good of a company, if used wisely.
Since our management can't get it right in any case, there doesn't necessarily seem to be an advantage to one method.
Couldn't agree more there. Money needs to be allocated at a high level to set the strategic direction of the company - in big buckets. The masters of the buckets have to spend it wisely, and they have to be trusted to spend it wisely.
Individual low-level managers have to have discretion when spending their funds. The CEO can't steer the company by blanket policy changes except in response to a serious need.
I still think that things have improved when you look at the dimensions of quality, timeliness, and cost. Maybe in some areas the cost hasn't gone down, but things are getting done better or faster. Computers can have a big impact on quality, since they allow better standardization of processes.
there doesn't seem to be such a huge demand for the tapes
I can't imagine why there wouldn't be a high demand for 120 hours of science lectures on tape for the low-low price of $800.
I could probably attend a live course and get credit for about that much money.
I'm sure if they put it on CD and charged $1 per disc they'd be more likely to get somewhere. At the proposed price just about anybody inclined to listen to it would go to the trouble to download and burn the whole thing...
Seriously though, I question studies which show no benefits from computers.
Usually they simply state that companies aren't making any more money now than they used to be, and so productivity hasn't imporved. The two aren't directly connected, however.
What happened is that everybody automated, and so everybody's costs dropped, and so everybody lowered prices to compete. Everybody makes the same money, but a tax accountant today costs the same or less in 2005 dollars as they cost back in the 70's using 1970 dollars. That is a big drop in price.
How can anybody seriously say that IT has had no benefit on productivity? Would we really be more effective if we were sending mail instead of e-mail? Or leaving 15 minute voicemails? Would the department budget really be better managed using paper and pencil rather than spreadsheet?
I can make statistics say anything I want, but only if you're stupid enough not to ask how I arrived at them...
How about XP Pro for that matter.
Just try having 10 computers map a share on your XP Pro machine.
The limit is still 5, I believe.
My Linux PC running Samba has better windows network serving capabilities than a full-priced install of XP Pro. It can even act as a PDC.
Oh, it is DEFINITELY faster. The extra regs are the biggest factor, but there are other improvements as well. There is also less CFLAG variation since right now there is really only one amd64 feature-set.
However, it is a little less bug-free.
Seriously, though, amd64 on gentoo does work fairly well - I use it for everything, and I have a 32-bit chroot for the few packages that don't work well. The only thing that gets messy is when you have a 32/64-bit browser and want to use plugins that are 64/32-bit. You can run 32-bit apps linked to 32-bit so's, and 64-bit linked to 64-bit, but you can't link the two together.
I'm fine with having trusted computing in PCs everywhere. I want to be able to trust my PC.
My only requirement is that I be given a copy of all keys stored within the computer, and a copy of any related keys associated with them using public-key-crypto.
If the motive of the people putting keys in my computer was purely to keep me safe, then they would have no qualms with giving me this information. If on the other hand they want to restrict how I use my computer, then they have every motive to not give it to me.
The problem with trusted computing is that major industries want to be able to trust computers that belong to others, not that people want to trust the computers that they actually own.
As long as I'm in charge I'm happy to have additional security features embedded in my PC...
Try amd64...
:)
Granted, you'll be lucky if it builds on the first try...
(Just kidding - the amd64 devs do a great job but this is not the arch for the faint of heart.)
Simple solution to that - you need the card to get out the door to go home... :)
Sounds to me like the laptop benchmarks should be to pull the AC power line and measure:
1. Total digits of pi calculated.
2. Total seconds of mp3 encoded.
3. Total minutes of DVD played.
4. Total number of frames rendered in some 3D project.
etc.
Then we don't fight over how many watts this model uses and the various tradeoffs involved. If it uses less power it will have more time to work. If it goes faster it will get more done in less time. Give the consumer all the numbers and he can figure out whether he'd rather have a laptop that is good and encoding mp3s or one which will last a long time spinning DVDs.
Actually, the x86 should handle virtualization just fine, as long as the operating systems don't need to run in ring 0.
:)
The main problem with the x86 is that a process is either privileged or not - there is only really a two-level heirarchy.
I guess the best system would be one with arbitrary levels of privs.
You could just add one more level and that would make the VMMs secure. However, it would make the platform unsuitable for VMMMs by the same argument, and consequently we'll need a platform which is better still, just in case you want to run windows and linux under linux, and then run linux under that windows and windows under that linux. However, that still won't help if you want to run windows under linux under windows under linux...
Well, my Tivo is doing that all the time now. It studders fairly often, and then will reboot - causing whatever is being recorded to lose about 5 minutes.
:)
Granted, I just installed a hard drive upgrade a week ago, which I think put it over the top. Before that it was just incredibly slow (it could take 30 seconds to display the list of recorded shows, and sometimes when fastforwarding you'd overshoot by 20 minutes before the system would respond to the remote). Forget editing season passes - you have to literally wait 15 minutes - that was before I upgraded it.
I'm probably going to reimage back to a single drive (the newer one), and see if that helps.
Don't get me wrong, Tivo is great. However, the series 1 units in particular have their limitations. What is annoying is that there is no documentation as to what those limits are. It would be one thing if Tivo at least advertised that it was good for up to x season passes, etc.
Who knows, maybe after a reimage everything will work fine.
Now, if I can only get rid of that horrible noise (my guess is that the fan is going too). Well, who expects consumer products to last four years these days anyway...
If you customized each customer's code, they probably will keep it private and accomplish your goals, which are all legal under the GPL.
Note that if you for some reason start getting lazy in supporting them your customers can just take your code and give it to somebody else to maintain. They could also ship it to Elbonia for future maintenance.
Likewise, if you started raising prices and your customers became dissatisfied they could band together and create a replacement for you which would maintain all of their code while maintaining confidentiality. They could even hire a programmer to run diffs to tell apart the areas of code that you provided to all customers vs a single one. Common code could then be donated back to the parent project that you borrowed from for maintenance.
The GPL allows for many business models, like the one that you propose. What it does though is empower the customer - if the vendor gets out of control the customer can go to somebody else, or bring maintenance in-house.